With widespread implementation of advances in electronic communication technologies (such as network connectivity, the Internet, and online services including audio and video streaming services), the use and transmission of audio files and video files as digital media is now commonplace.
Audiovisual files are becoming ubiquitous in the curricula of many academic disciplines. An online education course or class may, for example, include educational course content packaged as lecture audiovisual files, documentary or film videos, interactive instruction videos, etc. Online education course videos include short online “how to” tutorials to longer full length college courses. The lessons in some of the college courses may average 120 minutes or more at the default video playback speeds. While a large amount of content may be available in an online education course video, a viewer may still be pressed for time to view the entire video. To save time, such a viewer may speed up the playback speed, for example, to skip over portions of the video and view only a later portion of the video. The viewer may, for example, use a “fast forward” button or other speed controller on a video or media player to quickly advance the video to the later portion. A problem with this technique is that the user may miss interesting content that he fast-forwards past. Other techniques for reducing the total video viewing time may, for example, involve simply playing the video at a faster speed (e.g. 2× a normal or default speed). Such techniques are also likely to result in loss of information and yield unsatisfactory viewing or learning experiences. Playing the video at a faster speed may, for example, result in poor quality viewing (e.g., distorted sounds, garbled or incomprehensible speech, people in highly animated modes, etc.) as not all video content is made to go too fast.
Audio files, including audiovisual files, can be recorded while a person is speaking, and then played back at a later time. The playback of the file may occur at a predetermined rate or speed. However, when the file is played back at the predetermined rate or speed, the recorded speech of the speaker may be played back at a rate that is too fast for a listener to comprehend most successfully or may be played back at a rate that is inefficiently slow for the user. The user may adjust the playback speed of the file, but this may be cumbersome, especially when the file includes speech of different speakers who speak at different rates.